Network Solutions joins the namespace piracy business

This is a little bit off topic;

By John W. Moravec, Ph.D.

09 Jan 2008

This is a little bit off topic; but having just experienced a month-and-a-half-long ordeal where my moravec.us domain was taken hostage by “investors,” I believe it’s important to build awareness of this disturbing trend. Jay Westerdal writes at the DomainTools Blog on how Network Solutions, a company entrusted to manage Internet top level domains, is entering the namespace piracy market:

If a customer chooses not to register the domain name with Network Solution (sic) they are forced to wait 4 days for Network Solutions to delete the domain name in the Free Add Grace period. After the four day hostage period the consumer is free from the hostage situation and can register the domain somewhere else. However Network Solutions has now exposed those domains to Domain Tasters that will snipe those domain up milliseconds after Network Solutions deletes them. By registering the domain Network Solutions is exposing the domain in the DNS and every computer in the world now knows about the domain. These domains are now easy fodder for scammers and it is mind blowing that Network Solutions would expose their customers queries to the world in this manner.